When you ask children whom they admire, they often talk about their parents.

Another surprise was I asked kids what they were going to remember most from this period in their life, and I asked parents to guess what the kids would say. And parents almost always guess the big event, the vacation, the wonderful family reunion, you know, the five-star kind of family thing. And kids talked about the very small, everyday rituals and traditions that say to them "We're a family." So those everyday things that we do really matter a lot.

One child talked about that when she came down the stairs to go to school, her dad said, "You go, tiger, you go get them," and that was what she was going to remember most from being a young person. Another child talked about being in bed and the wake-up song -- this was not a little kid. But his mother always sang a wake-up song, and that's what he was going to remember most. ... That says to parents, "Have those rituals, have those traditions. Those are important, even with teens."   Ellen Galinsky, http://www.familiesandwork.org/